


The Inevitable Dusk

by zjofierose



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Brothers and Sisters - Freeform, Derek Feels, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Happy Ending, Kid Fic, M/M, a small amount of angst, brief kira/scott, sterek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 22:18:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1202584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell"</p><p>aka- Derek and all his women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Laura

**Author's Note:**

> this is canon compliant, except the characters I like lived. So, alive!Laura, and alive!Erica and Boyd. also, this is really more an extended character study than anything with an actual plot, so. And it does have kids, but there's no mpreg.

Laura was thirteen months older. Laura had _always_ been thirteen months older, and like older siblings everywhere, would always _continue_ to be thirteen months older. Derek wished more than once that he had been born first, just to give him enough of a head start to ever have any hope of keeping up with her.

Laura had been born early, kicking her way into the world in under four hours, eyes wide and mouth opening in a howl the second she was clear. Derek, the second child, had taken hours and hours and _hours_ to be born, and only finally came when the doctor, realizing that Derek had been sleeping through most of his own birth, reached in to wake him up. He’d yawned, blinked, and dozed off again as they wiped him down and swaddled him.

Where there was a will, there was a way, and where there was an obstacle, there was Laura trampling over it. She went from crawling to running, from baby babble to full sentences, and when Derek at 13 months refused to say a word in protest of her continual conversation, she would translate his facial expressions and communicate on his behalf.

It would be nice to say that Derek knew from the start that he could never catch Laura, and had accepted his role as underling with a zen-like equanimity. It would be nice, but it would also be a lie, one she’d call him out on in a heartbeat, laughing that loud laugh that echoed in places you would have thought were acoustically dead.

No, anything she had done, he had to do better. Or, _try_ to do better, anyway. She made straight A’s, so he took advanced classes. She picked up French seemingly overnight, so he labored over Spanish and Latin. She ran cross country in the fall and track in the spring, and was an alternate for the girls volleyball team, so he played soccer, basketball, and lettered in swimming. She was a virtuoso violinist; he stubbornly gutted his way through learning the trumpet until he could master the euphonium.

It was just past the start of the school year when the house burned, Laura an Ivy-league bound senior at 17, and Derek determinedly on her heels with three AP classes in his junior fall semester. She’d waited till the funerals were done, then packed their hotel room without a word and headed for the car. He’d followed, didn’t really know how to do anything else, and a hundred miles later she’d said “Eight months, Derek. We can make it till my birthday, then we’ll come back.” Her grip was steady on the wheel, her eyes dry. “No sooner. No one’s taking you away from me.”

They didn’t, of course. Come back in eight months, that is. By Laura’s 18th birthday they were ensconced in the swirl of New York, working shitty jobs, living in a tiny apartment where they shared a bed, pressed into each other like they’d done for the first five years of Derek’s life. Laura eventually got her GED, took (and aced) her AP tests, and wrote a personal statement that had NYU flinging money at her feet. Derek had never bothered with more than the GED, but she’d never cared.

She’d stayed behind when he’d come back to Beacon Hills, wrapped up in her boyfriend and the first classes of her final semester. They talked on the phone every night as he drove across the country, stories of her professors and his hotel rooms, her homework and his gas station lunch.

The first night he’d been back, he’d dreamed he’d lost her- dreamed that she’d been caught and killed, cut in half and butchered like an animal. He’d buried what he could find of her in an unmarked grave, spiraled rope and wolfsbane a helpless, hopeless apology on top. He woke gasping, claws tearing the sheets. He couldn’t speak when she answered her shakily dialed number, his voice abandoning him as surely as it had as an infant, but she still knew how to read his silence, how to parse the space between the things he couldn’t say.

“I’m here, Derek. It’s ok. I’m not going anywhere.”


	2. Allison

He’s a little too familiar with potential-suicide-by-girlfriend, and that’s not Allison’s fault, he knows that. But he can’t say that it doesn’t contribute to the way he feels about her, the way he feels about Scott being with her.

He appreciates that she looks nothing like her aunt. He can still see it, sometimes, in the tip of her eyes, or the way she lines up a shot, but he can pass that off as just a coincidence, doesn’t have to think of the shared blood, co-owned memories. Allison is nothing like Kate, it’s obvious just from looking at her, but he still thinks she’s trouble, thinks nothing good can come of her being around.

After a while he begins to think he’s wrong. Allison is brilliant, and kind, and he has no idea why her family waited to tell her about their secrets until she was this old, but he thinks it was a tactical error on their part. She’s too mature, too independent, too fucking _ethical_ to be brainwashed for long by Gerard, to be willingly blinded by the loss of Kate. There are a couple of hairy moments, sure, and he’s not sure if he’s doing the right thing when he goes to see her after her mother dies, but… what else can he do? She’s now joined the horrible club of two that he and Stiles had going, and the least he can do is help her process her membership dues.

He’s not prepared for how she flings herself at him and sobs into his shirt-front; he’s never seen her as anything other than the pretty, bubbly girlfriend or the steely-eyed sharp-shooter. He wraps his arms around her anyway and lets her rub snot onto his shoulder as she cries, saying nothing for hours as she sobs herself in and out of waking states. Scott’s not there, which is no doubt for the best- it’s their stupid star-crossed bullshit that’s at the root of all this anyway, and Derek would like to kill Scott for a moron himself. Scott doesn’t deserve her, Derek thinks, but since when does deserving enter into love anyway.

At some point Chris eases open the door and peeks in to check on Allison as she sleeps exhausted across Derek’s chest. He doesn’t even flinch at the sight, just nods once and closes the door. Derek rubs a hand across Allison’s back, stretching out his leg from where it’s falling asleep. He wants to hate Chris, in a half-hearted kind of way, but he can’t. For all that Chris has done in the past, a thousand petty insults,  a hundred jack-assed judgment calls, Derek can’t look at the pain carved into his face and feel anything but pity.

They never speak of it, him and Allison. She pulls herself together in the morning, and he slips out the window with a nod. But she always turns up, never all that often, but with a sort of regular frequency that he learns not to doubt. Even after she and Scott are off again for the upteenth time, and everyone’s away at college, some mornings he will come down to the re-built kitchen, and there she is in a sweatshirt holding a cup of coffee out to him.

He sets aside a room for her in the upstairs when he’s re-finishing it; one closet for clothing, one for weapons, good natural light. He never says anything, but the week after it’s painted, he goes in to dust and finds a change of clothes on the hangers, and a large composite bow leaning against the wall.


	3. Lydia

Lydia Martin has _trouble_ written all over her, Derek thinks, and he doesn’t understand why she and he are the only ones who seem aware of that fact.. She’s brilliant, gorgeous, ruthless, and it turns out she predicts and/or maybe summons death. Sure, why _wouldn’t_ you want to trail along after her, hearts in your eyes? Hand her your heart on a silver platter, go ahead- she’ll eat half, then wipe her bloody fingers on your shirt before walking away. What’s not to love?

He wants to respect her, he really does, and for five minutes they’re nearly friends, after Jackson leaves and she starts to come into herself, phoenixing herself up from the facile world of high school popularity. But she can’t maintain it; he doesn’t know why and they aren’t close enough for him to care, not really; and she falls back into her old habits- a bad boy here, a self-doubt there, and he hates it, watching her waste herself as a prop in someone else’s drama.

Graduation finally comes, and she skips it,  leaves without a word to anyone, packs her stylish monogrammed luggage and heads east to MIT. Full ride and starting summer semester, according to the Sheriff, and Derek smiles to himself as he gets her address. He sends her flowers, a large bunch of poppies, beautifully colored and also deadly. He has the floral clerk sign the tag “Good job”, and leaves it at that.

The first text comes a couple weeks later, a question about the accuracy of a historical footnote in a 15th century French manuscript on “monsters of the night”. He replies, and hears nothing till the next question several weeks later.

He can’t remember exactly when she starts staying at his place on the occasions that she deigns to come home on breaks; he knows something went funny with her Dad’s new wife, and so he doesn’t say anything when his two guest bathrooms sprout matching towel sets and a makeup mirror. Somehow she runs into or tracks down Laura, which is terrifying to Derek on some deep-seated instinctive level, and they become best friends. The photo of Lydia holding his hours-old nephew gets printed off and framed, then hides in his dresser drawer until it turns up on the mantelpiece with several others he hasn’t seen after the next spring break.

 


	4. Erica

He’s never been sure why he chose her, but he’s also never truly regretted it. He felt bad about it, for a good long while, but that’s a different thing than actual regret. Laura says, after she meets Erica, that his wolf just knew, and he thinks maybe there’s something to it- Erica is the most instinctive wolf he’s ever met, and maybe somehow he had sensed that.

He hopes so, because otherwise it was just fumbling in the dark, like so much he did back then, and he’d really like better for her.

Regardless, she takes to being a wolf like a fish to water. She shifts more easily than the boys, runs faster than the boys, fights more viciously than the boys, and has absolutely zero mental hang ups about it all. It makes sense, he supposes- if you’ve spent your whole human life being repeatedly betrayed by your body, then transforming it completely is probably just the gift that keeps on giving.

She tells her parents about the wolf when she and Boyd come back; she says she doesn’t want him to come, but he lurks outside just in case. In case of _what_ , he can’t really say; it’s not like he can go in and beat them up if they don’t take it well, but, he’s there. Just in case.

They’re shocked, of course, but once they figure out what it is for her, what it really _means_ for her, her mother starts weeping tears of joy while her father insists to know who is responsible for this miracle. Derek slinks off at that point, unable to tell if he’s more glad that it went well or more weirded out by someone actually being happy about what he is.

Erica goes to cosmetology school because she thinks it’s fun, but makes a killing prolifically writing romance novels on the side. She and Boyd get married at 20, and he gets a BA in Accounting with a minor in Publishing so that he can be her agent. The Reyes family has practically adopted Derek at that point; he joins them for Sunday dinner every other week and lets her dad feed him while her mom hands him a beer. Erica’s two younger sisters want to become wolves, too, but he’s told them he won’t consider it until they’re twenty one. Hypocritical, he knows, but the thought of three Ericas in wolf form is enough to strike fear into the heart of any of them.

He ends up godfather to their two girls and boy, and no, he can’t bring himself to regret a thing.

 


	5. Cora

He really doesn’t recognize Cora when he sees her; and really, how could he? The face he’d known had still been a child’s, and since he’d thought she was dead, he’d had absolutely no reason to expect to ever see an older version of it. It’s her voice that gives her away, though- he’d know her voice anywhere.

It’s hard. Cora and he had never been that close- the age gap between them was just big enough, and he and Laura were forever locked in their struggle for dominance. Cora’d been closer to Arthur, who was only two years younger than she was, and to their parents, than she ever was to Derek. They’d grown up in the same house, shared the same family, but he never could claim to know her well.

But still. She is his little sister, back from the dead (or South America, which, _what the hell_?), and he loves her.

So, they work it out. She lets him fuss over her, lets him worry about her, need to be near her, be gruff with her, push her around like they’re small children again. He lets her be angry, and angry, and angry.

It’s a slow process, and it’s hard. It takes a lot out of him, even just seeing her- it’s an emotional roller coaster, every day, because he thought she was dead, and now she’s not, and he’s so unbelievably grateful for that, but she kind of hates him, which is more than fair, and every time he looks at her all he can see is their mother’s face, and it guts him all over again.

It takes a couple of months, but he thinks they’re really starting to get somewhere, so of course that’s when she decides to leave. He finds her packing her things, sees her tickets to Lima, and they fight, long and loud and blessedly normal. There are no recriminations, no hints of everything that lies between them, just a stubborn 17 yr old girl who thinks she knows everything, and her stupid older brother who thinks he knows what’s best.

She finds him the night before she leaves in wolf form, shoving her muzzle up under his, biting at his jaw. He bats her away with one large paw, and they’re off, rolling and biting and yipping and snarling, playing and fighting and play-fighting until they’re exhausted, flanks heaving as they flop onto the grass of the backyard.

She’s gone when he wakes up naked and dew-covered just past dawn, but she’s left an address and a phone number on a sticky note on the kitchen table, which he thinks is more than he could really ask for, and his phone has a text from Laura saying she’s heading to Peru for the summer break, so.

It’s good enough.


	6. Kira

Kira is… unexpected. To all of them. She turns up out of nowhere, and is sweet and innocent and has that wide-eyed credulity that he thinks some of them might have had a couple years ago, but he can’t honestly remember what it even looked like.

She likes him. He’s completely unprepared for it, and reacts to it with disbelief, but it takes all of a couple days before he’s wound around her little finger. Which, he’d have a problem with that if she even knew, but she looks up to him, and that’s doing things to his ego/heart that he’s never felt before.

There’s a hitch for a while when she and Scott have a thing, and he thinks it’s really unfair to Kira, because she doesn’t know all of the history there, can’t know what she’s up against with Allison, can’t know that for all Scott may feel like he wants to move on, he never will. So, he talks to her about her emerging powers, and smiles when she starts turning up in a little leather jacket, and waits for the inevitable shoe to fall.

He takes her out for milkshakes when Scott and Allison get back together, and she doesn’t cry, just eats her whipped cream off the top one mournful spoonful at a time. _He_ kind of wants to cry, because this means she’ll go away, and he’s gotten to where he really likes her. She’s a good counterpoint to the beautiful intensity of Allison and Lydia, and she’s not the whirlwind of Erica or the stress of Laura. She’s nothing even like Cora, his _actual_ little sister, because even before the fire she was all sharp teeth and laughing bark. It’s too bad, really, that Kira will be leaving them.

Except she doesn’t. She keeps turning up. She’s a little sad-faced around the edges for a while, and definitely avoids Allison, but… she keeps coming. She goes shopping with Lydia and carries the bags, she hounds Isaac into teaching her how to play lacrosse in Derek’s backyard, she makes friends with Erica’s older little sister, Lizzie, and goes to the movies with her. She shows up on Saturday mornings with Stiles and waits hopefully at Derek’s kitchen table until he makes pancakes and expounds on pack lore and everything he knows about kitsunes and other magical creatures.

He doesn’t even pretend to get it, but he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If she wants to hang around with his motley pack, he’ll take it. He adds a hook to the wall by the door for her coat, finds a small blue beanbag chair for the library, and never so much as hints that he has no idea why she doesn’t just go.

  
  



	7. Natalia

The first time he sees Natalia’s face, he cries. She’s perfect, wrinkled and outraged, her dark eyes wide open and locked on Stiles’ face as he supports her head. Derek strokes a finger along her cheek and she turns to him, listening to his voice as he tells her her name.

She looks like the Sheriff, which he shouldn’t be surprised by, seeing as her genetics are half from Stiles, but somehow he never thought his daughter would be blonde. John says she won’t stay that way, he’s the only blond one in his family, it’ll darken up when she’s older, but in the meantime Nat’s towheaded in the summer sun, all flying baby curls and toddler shrieks.

Her eyes, when they settle, are somewhere between his and Stiles’- grey, but with a hazel ring, surprisingly dark for a color that’s not actually brown. Laura laughs at him when he says something about assuming they’d be brown like hers, since it was her egg and everything. “Genetics are complicated.” She shrugs. “We have the same genes, but you got the pretty eyes, not me. Besides.” She sips her iced tea and watches him watching Nat roughhouse with the McCall twins, “She’s a magic baby. She gets to be whatever she wants.”

Laura’s right, he thinks, as he puts Nat in her crib, laughing under his breath as Stiles’ nimble fingers pull bits of grass from her hair. She was a group effort. Stiles and Laura had donated the genetic material, but it was Allison who’d carried her, offering nonchalantly when her twins were a year old, and calmly making coffee as Derek had sat poleaxed, squeezing Stiles’ hand way too tightly. It was a risk- one of the twins had been a wolf, and it was hard on Allison, hard on her body without the supernatural healing, to carry to term. There was no way to know if their child, _their child_ , would be a wolf or not, how great a toll Allison’s offer might take on her.

They take three days to decide, and then the whirlwind of treatments and procedures begin. Stiles deals with it all, waits on Laura and Allison hand and foot, drives them to appointments, cooks for them. It’s a little ridiculous, but they don’t take advantage, they accept it for the gesture of unbelieving gratitude that it is, and haul him down on the couch with them to drink lemonade and watch terrible 80s action movies.

Derek builds a house.

He doesn’t really intend to, it just gets stuck in his head that Scott and Allison have been looking to buy for a while, but Scott’s still paying for veterinary school, and with the twins, they’re not able to save much, and besides, it’s healthiest for a baby to be nursed, and Allison can’t do that if she’s across town very well. By the time he realizes what he’s doing, he’s got it half framed out, just far enough from his own rebuilt house that the wolves can’t hear each other without actively trying.

Isaac and Erica and Boyd help him get the beams and walls in place. Kira turns out to be incredibly detail-oriented, and gets put in charge of the shingling and the bathroom tile. Lydia picks out the appliances, the windows, the curtains, and the front door. It takes three months, by which point they know that Allison is expecting for sure, that in seven more months…

Derek paints the house yellow, because he’s happy.

 


End file.
